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[Music] resourceful designer episode 32 graphic designing with the retainer agreement [Music] welcome to the resourceful designer podcast offering solutions to streamline your graphic and web design business so you can get back to designing and now your host he has over 20 swords decorating his office mark de coat welcome to another episode of resourceful designer I got a really interesting topic to discuss with you today and that's retainer agreements how they work and how they can benefit your business and as always I'm gonna have my resource of the week and my question of the week and this week's question will be from Kaitlyn so look for that towards the end of the podcast now I hope you've been having a great week in your design business so far I've had a rollercoaster of a ride in my week I acquired a new website client and I'm also designing a t-shirt for an old client of mine she runs a dance school in town here and for the past 13 years going back to when I was working at the print shop I've designed the logo for their yearly recital and this is a great client to work with because all she does is she's gives me the theme to the recital whatever the theme happens to be that year and then lets me create anything I want she never gives me any ideas she wants it to come all from my head so I absolutely love working on her work every year so I started that job this week but as I said it was a rollercoaster ride and that's because I received a letter from a client yesterday and let me tell you something today is this is Friday morning I was planning to record the episode yesterday on Thursday and get it out on Thursday but I was in such a bad mood after receiving a letter from a client that I just couldn't bring myself to record the podcast in the mood that I was in and this was a new client that I just designed a logo for and done some business cards for and he sent me a letter of frustration and saying that he won't be using my services anymore because he did not like my communication skills now let me read a quote from what he said I'm not gonna name any names obviously but let me read a quote says I can't believe I'm even gonna pay you after the terrible service I've been receiving over the past several weeks this has taken much longer than I anticipated and it didn't help that you went dark for an entire week during the process without so much as an explanation then he went on a little bit more and then he says you have set me back weeks in my business plan because of a simple little logo design that probably took you seven minutes to create I'll not be using your services in the future or recommend your services to any of my colleagues so you can understand after receiving this letter the mood that it put me in now the thing is is he talks about my terrible communication skills and how I went dark for an entire week during the process now if you've been with me for a few weeks now you know that my brother passed away I mentioned it on the podcast and I took a week off to fly to Vancouver for the funeral and to be with family well that's the week he's talking about now no I did not let my clients know that my brother passed away but I did send a letter out to them telling them that due to personal family matters I will be out of the office for that week now I talked to this client yesterday after receiving this email and I explained to him that that's why I went away it was because of my brother well he said he didn't care what my explanation was it was in the middle of his project and he didn't appreciate that I decided to take a week off that was unplanned and when I told him I says well of course it wasn't planned my brother passed away he said what you could have let me know that and I says well sorry I don't normally share my personal life with my clients I just told them the due to a personal family matter I'd be out of the office and he says well a personal family matter doesn't tell me anything and if I'm gonna hide stuff from him he doesn't want to do business with me and then his little job about a logo that probably only took me seven minutes to create I reminded him that I actually supplied him with four different logo designs and he picked this particular logo and I quote this logo is perfect I've shown it around to everybody and everybody loves it this will be the perfect front for my business unquote and I reminded him of that and he says yes they do love it but he says yeah but it's still so simple that it probably took me no time at all to design now I didn't even bother trying to explain to him that no it didn't take me that long to design but it took me over 25 years of experience to get to the point where it didn't take me that long to design so anyways all in all this is a very small client I know from talking with him that he doesn't have any money for any marketing or anything like that he can barely scrape up the money in order to do the logo in the business cards so I'm not gonna fret too much about losing him he did tell me at the end of the phone call that he sorry he won't be using my services anymore even after I explained everything so I'm just gonna wash my hands of him but you can see what sort of mood I was in and that's why it didn't record the podcast yesterday I just didn't think it would be fair to you even just talking about it now I'm getting a little riled up but that's just all part of our business and what we have to deal with so I lost one client this week but as I said I gained another one for a website so it'll all balance out in the end ah the pros and cons of running your own graphic design business well on to more cheerful things I want to thank all of you that have nominated resourceful designer for a podcast award the nomination period is just about over in fact at the time of this recording the nominations are open for just over a day now they closed at the end of the day on April 30th so if you haven't nominated any podcasts I encourage you to visit resourceful designer comm slash podcast Awards and that'll take you to a page that will explain to you what you need to do and I'd really appreciate it if you could nominate resourceful designer in the arts category with the URL resourceful designer com and then we'll find out in a few weeks if the podcast is nominated for an international podcast award so as I said a few of you have already reached out to me to say that you have nominated the podcast so I really appreciate that I thank you for the nomination and trusting in this podcast but if you haven't done so already and it's something that you'd be interested in doing you'll have to hurry up because the nomination period closes at the end of the day on April 30th and by all means don't just submit resourceful designer in arts there's lots of other categories there that you can list all the other podcasts that you may listen to so once again you can get all the instructions by visiting resourceful designer comm slash podcast Awards and now on to my resource of the week you know I've honestly don't remember if I ever mentioned this resource before I think I might have talked about it but I don't know if it was actually my resource of the week and if so if I did in fact use it before it's well worth mentioning again and that's the website what the font calm now what the font used to be a standalone website now it's part of my font so when you visit what the font calm you actually end up on my fonts and then you have to click the what the font menu at the top that take you there but this is a website that I've been using for years well over a dozen years now back when they were on their own and not part of my fonts and I sure hope that you're already familiar with this resource if not it is a wonderful way for discovering what font is used in a certain piece and all you do is you upload an image whether it's a PNG file a gif or a JPEG any image under two megabytes you upload it and then when you process it some OCR software will go in the optical character recognition it'll show you what it thinks the characters are and you can correct it if it's wrong so if it's thought something was a letter D but actually it's the letter O you can change that and then once all the letters were correctly guessed when you hit continue it'll give you a list of all the fonts that it thinks this font can be and this has helped me so much over the years in finding font especially when a client comes to me with something and they need something changed on one of their existing pieces a lot of times it'll be the the catchphrase under their logo they'll want to do some changes to that but they wanted in the same font and they're not going back to the original designer they're getting me to do it or sometimes in my case where I am in Ontario here sometimes somebody will bring me an English piece brochure and add and they say well can you do a French piece for us because there's a lot of French publications around this area and they want it to match exactly so I'll have to find out what fonts they are so as I said I've been using what the font for years for this and it's not always 100% accurate in fact I'd say it's about 60 to 70 percent accurate but that's a lot better than just trying to search online or search through your vas font database try to figure out exactly what font it is I've even used it for jobs that I've done before where I might have accidentally outlined all the fonts in illustrator and not kept an original copy and when I go back a couple of years later to look at something I have no idea what font I used but I know it's a phone on my system so I'll just quickly throw it into what the font and usually within a minute or two the name pops up and I can go activate that font using suitcase and away I go so that's my resource this week hopefully it's something you're already familiar with it's been around for years and it's been a blessing to many graphic designers and saved hours and hours of searching through font libraries and now on to the main topic graphic designing with a retainer agreement now if you remember back in episode 11 of resourceful designer where I talked about pricing strategies for your graphic design business I talked about hourly rates and job rates and when I got to value-based pricing I mentioned how it's the holy grail of pricing where you can determine how much a job is worth by the value it'll bring to the client and charge accordingly and an example I used in that podcast was how if you design a logo for a mom-and-pop corner convenience store you might charge them a couple hundred dollars but if you design a logo for Pepsi Cola you're gonna charge them a few thousand if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for the logo just because you know the Pepsi Cola is gonna get more value out of that logo than the mom-and-pop will for the the logo for their corner store so that's why I said it was the holy grail of the pricing strategies for your graphic design business now in that podcast I never mentioned retainers because retainer is not really a pricing strategy but if you're gonna look at the whole payment to end your income a retainer agreement would probably be a close second if I was to view it as a pricing strategy so what exactly is a retainer agreement simply put a retainer means you're being paid in advance for future work now usually this can be on a monthly or a yearly basis where your clients will give you an amount of money up front knowing that you will be doing work for them in the weeks and months ahead what's nice about it is when you have a retainer agreement it allows you to plan your work in advance because you know what works gonna be coming in you've already been paid for it so you know your clients gonna be giving you this work in some cases it might be so many hours a week that you have to work for this client or it might be a certain job you have to do in my case I had a client that I was doing newspaper ads for every Monday morning and that was a client I had on retainer and I knew that every Monday morning I had to work on their ads now they paid me a fixed amount regardless of how long I actually spent on the job so I was paid the same amount whether it took me four hours to create an ad or it took me 20 minutes to create the ad and in the end it would kind of all balance because some weeks would take longer and some weeks would be faster and there has been times where on Monday morning I'd sit down in 20 minutes later I was done my work for that client and there have been other weeks where I've sat down and it was past lunchtime and I was still working on their stuff but we had agreed to a fixed rate and that's what they paid me in advance for doing that work so that was a retainer agreement we had now unfortunately for me that client just notified me two weeks ago that they were gonna be ending that agreement as of the 1st of May they've decided to change things up and I believe I actually mentioned this last week where they went from print ads to online ads so that retainer agreement I had with that client is now come to an end but having a retainer agreement as I said it allows you to plan your work in advance because you know what works gonna be coming in and that's a stability you don't often have with traditional work because as graphic designers you know that your work could come at any time there's some weeks where you can be so busy that you're pulling your hair out because you don't know where you're gonna find the extra hours to do it and then there's gonna be other weeks where you're sitting there waiting for your phone to ring so having a retainer it's like having a steady paycheck you know this money is coming in regardless of how busy you are during that week which is really nice now the other thing about a retainer agreement is it really really helps strengthen your relationship with your clients and I've talked to you before in episode 20 about building relationships with your graphic design clients how important having that relationship is because you become more than just the graphic designer for them which was also last week's topic in episode 31 and when you're on retainer you also have that benefit of knowing that your clients not going elsewhere for work they're coming to you for designs and hopefully for help and for a lot more and because they're already paying you they're gonna definitely come to you for these services so what are the pros and cons of having a retainer agreement well the pros as I said steady paycheck you know that on a weekly monthly or possibly yearly basis you're gonna get this money from a client another Pro is you get better clients your little one-time clients or sporadic clients are never going to go for retainer agreement but you're good well paying usually corporate clients are the ones to go after for this and they're usually a higher caliber of clients than your other ones and the other Pro is a lot of clients like a retainer agreement because it benefits them as much as it benefits you now what are some of the cons of having a retainer agreement well there could be scheduling conflicts depending on how many retainer agreements you have as I said in my case I had one where every Monday morning for the past ten years I was doing an ad for this client but what if I had another client that had a strict deadline for something and I needed to work on it on Monday well then I would have a scheduling conflict because I knew I had to work on this retainers client and I would probably have to find some extra time I might have have to work on the weekend on this in order so I can save up some time for the other client that had some sort of deadline so there could be some scheduling conflicts especially if you have more than one retainer agreement with different clients and they each sure are vying for your time another con is dependence issues and this all comes down to how you actually structure your agreement with them because sometimes since the client is already paying you and they've paid you upfront for work they think that they can depend on you for other things as well and they'll start throwing stuff your way and depending on how you structured your agreement you could end up being taken advantage of and make a lot less money than you originally thought you would now another con is the potential of less pay look as I said I made an agreement with a client for those odds and some weeks I would work twenty thirty minutes on an odd and other weeks I would work hours on an odd but what happened if it just so happens that every week I was working four or five hours and yet the retainer agreement we had worked out was maybe let's say two and a half hours a week well if the client agreed to pay me for two and a half hours a week to work on their ads regardless of how much time I actually spent on it and I ended up spending four hours every week I'd be making less money than I would for working with a normal client so you got to think of that up front and you there's little clauses you have to put in your retainer agreement to allow for variations and stuff like that I don't get more on that later now the last con I want to talk about is the possibility of relationship damage when you have an agreement in place you have to be very strict on following it and being there for the client because if you're not it can actually damage the relationship more so than if you didn't have an agreement in place because this sort of contract the client comes to depend on you and if you can't deliver then he could really hurt that relationship so whenever you do have a retainer agreement in place with a client you may have to make sure you do everything you do to keep that client happy so I've told you now what the pros and the cons of a retainer agreement are and why you might want to get into them but what sort of work can you actually do under a retainer agreement well the obvious thing is recurring work like I said I was doing those ads on a regular basis so any work that you do over and over again for a client is a great potential to be put on retainer for routine maintenance on a website if your client is getting you to do something on a regular basis whether it's just updating plug-ins maybe they want you to publish their blog or something every week not necessarily write it or maybe they are getting you to write it or every week they send you the updates for their event calendar for you to put in well that's the sort of stuff that you can do under a retainer agreement instead of just keeping track and doing it as it came in you can tell the client listen you want me to do this work for you on a regular basis let's set up a fixed amount that you're gonna pay me and I'll take care of this and what's good about this is not only do you have recurring money coming in your client now knows how much it's costing them every month instead of guessing on how much you're gonna invoice them at the end of the month or quarterly or whatever the case will be they now know upfront how much they're paying you and sometimes that's worth taking the gamble that they're overpaying you just knowing that fixed amount upfront another thing you can do under retainer agreement is cover emergency issues you might be paid a certain amount on a monthly basis just to be there in case somebody needs you now this can be great type of work because you get paid and you might not be called upon at all but when they do call you you have to be there for the client now a lot of times this will work mostly with web clients if they're doing a lot of back-end stuff and they mess something up on their website they want to know that you're there to fix the problem whenever it happens and whenever they need you and another thing you can do is just consulting services maybe you're gonna be there for your client just in case they need something or they need your advice and they can pay you up front for this sort of stuff for them to be able to call on you when they need you for marketing advice or strategic planning or whatever the case may be so now I want to talk about the retainer agreement itself now as I just said not all work fits into a retainer agreement continuing jobs and reoccurring work are the ones that benefit the most from a retainer agreement periodic work or sporadic work such as building websites or in some case doing ads or just regular marketing material may not work as well depending on how you work out the agreement website maintenance after you've built a website for a client is the perfect opportunity for a retainer agreement now as I mentioned earlier having a poorly planned retainer agreement can possibly result in you being taken advantage of so it is strongly recommended that when you begin when you start on retainer with a client that you lay out the groundwork and specify what does and what does not fall under the retainer agreement maybe you agree that your monthly maintenance for the website with updating plugins making sure WordPress is up to date if you're running WordPress checking for broken links and all that stuff might be under the retainer agreement but installing a new plug-in or creating a new section of the website or going to create a new product page or updating some sort of page maybe their employee page and you're going in to change who's working there and and remove some employees that are not there anymore that sort of work might not fall under the retainer agreement in that case you would be charging extra to your client so you have to specify upfront what is and what is not in the retainer agreement now a lot of that will be determined by what type of retainer you agree on and there's a bunch of different ways you can do this one way you can do it is you have a set fixed amount of hours you work in a given time so maybe your client agrees to pay you for five hours of work per week or ten hours of work per week and maybe they have projects that take much much more than that or or you've got some ongoing things that you're doing for them on a regular basis and you just keep track of your hours and you put in ten hours of work per week and when you're ten hours are done that's it and then you pick up again the following week and the client pays you upfront for all this time and that's a great way to do it another type of retainer you can do is a fixed number of jobs in a given period of time like in my case it was one AD per week if the client required any other services for me I would build them extra but that fixed amount that I was getting was to cover one AD per week it didn't matter how long it took me to do the ad they were paying for one ad now a little different take on the hours of work in a given time could be the dollar amount you need to work off so in some cases a client may say I'll pay you a thousand dollars right now and you just keep track of your hours until you've worked off that thousand dollars and then we'll negotiate something else or or whatever but that way the client knows that you are focused on them and then they kind of want a priority and a lot of times the client asks for a discount in cases like this so maybe if you bill a certain amount per hour the client might say I agree to pay you X amount of money up front but you give me a discount on your hourly rate as you work it off so if you charge $100 per hour maybe the client will say I'll give you a thousand dollars upfront and then you just work off your hours but you work them off at seventy-five dollars an hour for me and then it's up to you to see say is it worth it is it worth lowering your hourly rate in order to get this guaranteed on income where they will pay you this upfront and you know you now have the money in the bank and you just need to work off the time or do you take the chance and not enter a retainer agreement with the client and take the risk that they might take some of their work elsewhere if they've paid you upfront you know they're not going to go elsewhere for design they're gonna come to you another interesting type of retainer and I've actually had a client do this for me quite a few years ago is a preferential treatment bonus I had a client that called me up one day and needed something done right away and I told them that I couldn't get to it today I couldn't I could only get to it the next day because I was in the middle of another job and we ended up getting the job done but the client came to me afterwards and said what would it take for you to drop everything you're doing in order to work on our project and we came to agreement that they paid me a certain amount every month just so that they would get preferential treatment from me if they needed me now it wasn't a big amount was just a couple of hundred dollars a month but the agreement was that if they called up and they needed something I was to drop all other work I was doing and focus on their work and most of the time this worked out fine because they weren't big jobs a lot of times they were just quick easy and dirty little jobs that they needed done like you know fix this or update this but they wanted it done right away now there were a few times where it did cause issues where a project I was working on and ulsan they called and they needed to something done that took a few hours and it just meant that I was working very late into the evening which I don't normally do to finish the work that got bumped because of some deadline or something but then there was also some other months where the client never called me for anything at all and yet they still paid me that preferential treatment bonus as they call it and I got that money whether they needed my services or not now that lasted a little less than a year and I actually ended up firing that client myself and I talked about that way back in episode 5 don't compromise your principles for your design business because that was the client that wanted me to design something that I thought was unethical and I refused to design it and they said if you don't design this for us we're gonna take all our work elsewhere and I had to put my foot down and says no I wouldn't design what they wanted me to design so they were a really big client and as I said I was getting this preferential treatment bonus from them but that all ended when I ended that relationship you want to know more about that go listen to episode 5 where I talk about this client and how I ended the relationship with them and the final type of retainer talk about is just being on call and that's not necessarily the same as a preferential treatment bonus as I said that was a bonus they were paying that money to me just so that I would do the work I was still billing them for the work I was doing the money they were giving me as the preferential treatment bonus was on top of what I was billing them at my regular hourly rate we were not on a retainer for anything else they just wanted to make sure that if they did call me I would drop everything and work on their stuff but you can be on a retainer where it's just being on call and I've never had one of these myself but I do know another designer that he gets paid a small amount monthly from a company that sometimes there they have their own design department but they often will get overwhelmed and they pay this guy I know a small amount every month just to be on call if they need him now in this case he actually has to go into their office and do the work there they don't want him to do it from home and he could be called in at all hours of the day because they actually have a 24 hour shift running but he gets paid a little bit every month just to be on call in case they need him and he's told me that there's sometimes been 3-4 months go by that he was he didn't receive a single call from them but he still got paid so those are different types of retainers that you can set up there there's lots of other ways as well but those are the most popular one now one last thing I want to talk about about these different types of retainers and just go over them quickly again there was fixed hours of work in a given time period fixed number of jobs in a given period the fixed dollar amount you needed to work off then there's the other two preferential treatment and being on-call but the fixed hours fixed number of jobs and fixed dollar amount usually the time period will be either a week or a month or sometimes a year but you have to write it into your agreement what happens if you don't use that all up or what happens if you go over like if you have a fixed amount of hours in say a week the client agrees to pay you for 10 hours of work per week well what happens if you take 12 hours or 14 hours it has to be in your agreement that you're allowed to charge them for the extra hours at your normal hourly rate but you should also have in your agreement but if they're paying you for 10 hours of work per week and yet they only use you for eight hours the extra two hours shouldn't carry over to the next week and allow them 12 instead of 10 it should be in your agreement that at the end of the agreement period like whether it's weekly or monthly everything resets to zero same thing for the fixed number of jobs the client I had was paying me for one AD per week to go into a local newspaper now every once in a while they would have an ad for me to do that would be going into a magazine something other than my normal ad well they were paying me for one AD per week so any other ads I did I would charge some extra for it and that was agreed upon same thing with the fixed dollar amount if a client says that they're gonna pay you a thousand dollars a month and you have to work off that time well if you're only partway through the month and you've already worked off the thousand dollars your agreement should state that you can charge them an hourly rate for everything beyond and your agreement should also state that you keep the full thousand dollars even if you don't reach that amount during the month so you get to see how the retainer can help you in that way the client pays you for 10 hours of work per week and you're only doing five if you just doubled your hourly rate if that's what it was based on so when is a good time to set up a retainer agreement with a client for most things when you first meet a client is not a good time to do it the best time is when you're doing more and more work for a smaller segment of clients if you have a whole bunch of clients you're working on with twenty thirty different clients then you might not want to be in a retainer agreement with any of them because you're gonna be stretched too thin but if you've gotten to the point in your career where you have maybe five to ten steady clients that you work on a regular basis those are the clients that you want to approach with the retainer agreement and see if it'll work for both of you now with the smaller clients depending on what it is it's anytime you do any recurring work and most popular out of all of that is website maintenance when you design a website for somebody you probably get paid some sort of fee for designing the website but then you can charge them a monthly fee and usually this would be a retainer they would pay you in advance for what you're do for the month and it would be a fixed amount that they would pay you now obviously when it comes to dealing with clients and approaching them for retainer agreements the larger the client the easier it is to sell the idea on because it doesn't affect their budget as much as it does smaller clients a small one-person operation that's running on a day to day basis is not gonna want to put out two three four five hundred dollars a month for your services if they don't think that they're gonna be able to use up all those services but a large client that has a large marketing budget would probably look at it favorably because they know ahead of time exactly what it's gonna cost them so how do you approach the client well there's a few things you have to do first of all as I said this is best to do with clients that you're already familiar with you're already doing work with and the best thing to do is first remind them how dependable you are and remind them of the work that you've done for them and how its benefited them remind them of how much money they're already spending with you and then come up with some sort of monthly retainer that you can both agree upon the works in both your favors you can also vary the commitment terms whether it's on a weekly basis a monthly basis or a yearly basis and a good thing to do is set up a term with a client say let's do this on a monthly basis but if they want to commit to a longer term you can give them a bonus what I mean by this is if you say you're setting up an agreement with client and say it's gonna cost them $500 a month for your services you can say but if you book six months right now I'll give you a 10% discount or book five months and I'll give you the six month for free give them some sort of bonuses if they're gonna do this long term because then it means to you that you're guaranteed that income for six months and you can build them on a six month basis or you get them to pay for the whole thing upfront you can tell a client that you're gonna charge this amount per month but if you pay me for the full year then you get a discount off the full price because that way the money is in your bank now obviously when you are pitching the retainer agreement you want to include some sort of required notice to cancel so if your client decides to cancel it it should be specified in the agreement that you need say 30 days notice so that way say you're being paid the first of the month and on the 25th your client decides that they don't want to continue with this they need to give you say at two weeks or a one-month notice which means that they still have to pay you the first of the month they still have to pay you the following week for that month and then the agreement will be over so you're not sitting there a couple of days before you're expecting to be paid and also be told that money it isn't coming in so you have to have some sort of required notice to cancel and that could apply to both of you you should be doing the same thing just in case for some reason it's not working out with the client you have to have an out in your agreement saying the same thing that you will tell your client that after such-and-such a date whether it's a two-week period a one-month period that you will be ending the agreement yourself and that could be for various reasons maybe you're not happy dealing with the client maybe you're changing your business structure maybe you're retiring and you're closing up your business and you need to be able to tell them advant advantage mark reports and this is great for websites and stuff where if you're doing work on a retainer basis to help them not just doing updates but say you're you're helping them with your SEO and with their sale funnels and all that stuff you could show them some reports on how month-over-month the traffic on their website is increases the conversion rates have increased and show them what they're actually benefiting by having you on retainer so once you've pitched the idea and your client has agreed to a retainer agreement the details you need to include in their agreement are the amount you'll receive and the amount of work that's expected of you so are you gonna receive $500 and be expected to produce one job or are you gonna be expected to work off that $500 or are you expected to supply so many hours of work so that's definitely the first thing is how much you will receive and the amount of work and how they expect to deduct that from the amount you're receiving you should also include the date that you are to be paid and how often are you being paid the first of the month are you being paid weekly are you being paid yearly quarterly how often are you gonna be paid and on what date are you gonna be paid and that way you can keep track that okay I they've missed their payment there's something up here how much work and the type of work that is expected of you if you're setting up a retainer agreement for website maintenance you have to specify what maintenance actually is to you it might mean one thing but your client it might mean something completely different so put down in writing exactly what that is should also include how much notice you required for said work when a client contacts you for work is that part of the agreement that you drop everything else you're doing to work on your clients work or do you set it up in the agreement when the client contacts you you will begin work within 24-48 hours so that has to be set up how much notice you require for said work you also have to put in the agreement what happens if you go beyond the agreed-upon terms if they'd have agreed to pay you for ten hours of work and you work more than ten hours you should be able to build them for that additional time now I would suggest you not discount this because then the clients just gonna take advantage of you and who cares they're still getting a discount if you don't discount it and the extra hours you charge them at your full rate then what you can do is you can renegotiate your contract at some point especially if they're going over on a regular basis and say listen you're paying me ten hours a week and yet I'm regularly doing twelve or fourteen hours and I'm charging you extra so why don't we just suggest the retainer for fourteen hours per week or fifteen hours per week and then you'll it'll save you money in the long run this is what you're telling your client now what it does for you is all of a sudden you're guaranteed that extra work so if by chance one week you don't do it now instead of being ten hours you've got fourteen hours to work with so if they do give you the ten hours you've got four hours bonus there the other thing that you have to include in the retainer agreement is who pays for expenses incurred while working for the client if you're designing stuff for them and they need some photographs and you go buy some stock photos or you hire a photographer who is paying for that is that part of your retainer agreement price that they're paying or are they gonna pay on top of that same thing with like say website maintenance if you're doing weight maintenance were on a website and there's a premium plug-in that you have to pay say on a yearly basis are they paying that plugins price or are you including it in the feet make sure you include in the agreement that there's no carryover if the client doesn't use up all the agreed-upon time or amount during a given period there's no banking or accumulating or carrying over anything if at the end of the given time period the end of the week the end of the month there's still time remaining or money remaining it does not carry over everything resets to zero for the next time period in the agreement as I talked about before you have to include what is required to end the retainer relationship and what sort of period is included in that and of course anything else that you can think of that pertains to the project the job the client and so forth and one more important thing to include is include an end date if you are gonna agree to do this for say on a monthly basis well put the in the agreement that the agreement ends one year from now or two years from now or whatever or you can also call it a renegotiation date so say you set up an agreement and the clients gonna pay you X amount of dollars per week to do the work well a year from now you can renegotiate maybe you've decided to raise your rates and a year from now the $500 per week that the client was paying you now you're gonna want 550 and it's up to the client if they want to continue the agreement at the new price so either set up an end date or a renegotiation date so you can have scheduled points where you can raise those rates if you need be so I think I've covered everything I wanted to cover here about retainer agreements they are great for your business I've had several clients with them over the years right now at the time of this recording I don't have him anymore as I said my last one just finished a couple of weeks ago the client let me know that as of the 1st of May our agreement will be over so I currently don't have anybody on retainer right now but I am actually using suppliers on retainer and this is something else that I hadn't really thought about discussing but it just popped into my head right now is you can set up something with your suppliers it doesn't have to be just you and your clients you're the supplier to your client well you're with your suppliers I had a printer actually it's the printer I used to work at I have an agreement with them that if I need any digital copies like on a digital copying machine I've got a printer here but it's just a small office printer if I need any flyers or posters or anything done for a client they have a tiered rate there so if you go in for one copy it's gonna cost you I've to be honest I don't remember but let's just give you an example if you go in and you get one letter size copy it's gonna cost you 99 cents if you get 10 copies they're gonna cost you 89 cents each if you get 50 copies they'll cost you 79 cents if you get a hundred copies they'll cost you 69 and so forth down to I think the their cheapest is 39 cents a copy if you get over a thousand copies or something like that and as I said I'm just making up these prices this isn't the actual prices they have but what I've done is I paid them a thousand dollars in advance to guarantee the lowest rate regardless of the number of copies I get so if I need 10 copies of something they're gonna charge me or they're gonna deduct from my thousand dollars that I've paid them they're gonna deduct the price as if I was getting a thousand copies or more and the reason I did this is now I can have clients who I design a poster for and maybe they need 40 posters to put up around town well I can charge the client the price that it would actually cost them if they went to the printer for 40 posters I charge that to my client but when the printing shop charges me they charge me the rate as if it was a thousand posters so depending on it I could make twenty thirty forty cents per poster whatever it's not a whole lot but in the long run a thousand dollars I paid up front ends up almost doubling in income by what I turn around and charge my clients so make sure you look at the retainer agreement in that way as well where you can maybe pay your suppliers upfront in order to get preferential treatment or preferential prices from them so that's a little bonus that I hadn't really considered sharing with you is just popped into my head here as I was finishing things off but to close off this discussion I just want to remind you that when you set up these retainer agreements it's really nice to see this money it comes in on a regular basis and you get this work but don't get complacent it's very nice to see this as a regular paycheck but as I can attest to just a couple of weeks ago I lost the client or not I didn't lose the client I lost the retainer agreement that we had where I was doing these ads for them and I'd been doing these ads for close to 10 years on a weekly basis and all sudden I lost that steady stream of income it wasn't a lot of money but it was guaranteed that it was coming in so don't get complacent while working on retainer you need to keep looking for other work that's one of the things that designers happen to sometimes is if they get three four five clients on retainer and when you calculate the amount they're getting it's steady enough that they figure while I don't have to go look for other work you got to remember that if a client ends this agreement there goes part of your salary so even when you have several clients on retainer agreements never stop looking for new clients so that's it for this week's discussion now as I mentioned at the beginning I do have a question of the week in fact I've got a whole bunch of questions of the week for the next few episodes of the podcast questions were very scarce there a month or so ago but it seems that more and more people are sending in stuff so I'm keeping track of them if you sent in a question and it hasn't been answered yet don't worry I've got them in a queue to come up I'm only answering one per week and this one comes in from Katelyn and a very appropriate question for this week's topic she says I've been lucky enough to gain my first handful of web design clients which is extremely exciting but as each contract comes to a close I'm always flooded with a variety of other services I know I could offer the client such as content marketing designs or ebook designs how would you recommend turning web design clients into retainer clients even if the retainer is simply website maintenance I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject how you've handled the assist you in the past and what services you tend to offer your clients as a long-standing basis after the website design is complete well thanks for that question Kaitlin and as I said very appropriate I did not plan this is just Caitlin's question was the next one in the queue and it falls right along with today's topic which is a nice little bonus first of all congratulations on landing your first handful of Web Design clients Kaitlin I remember how exciting that time is when you're starting off and you're getting your first few clients it's such a wonderful feeling now what I suggest you is the best time to discuss this stuff is not when your contract comes to a close but when you're actually negotiating the contract upfront especially when it comes to web clients whenever I'm discussing I always have separate contracts that I get them to sign and whenever I'm discussing a web project with them whether it's a small website a large website I always discuss the ongoing maintenance of the website afterwards right from the get-go and I let them know what is required and that a website it used to be fine ten years ago where you would build a website and then you would just leave it there and nobody would touch it for two three four god five years there's some websites you see out there that you know were built over ten years ago and yet other than being completely outdated there's really nothing wrong with the website but nowadays the way things are changing websites need to change on a regular basis and be updated so if you let your clients know right from the get-go but this is stuff that is required and I always give my client the option if they want to take care of it themselves like updating a plug-in is not a big issue you just go into your backend of WordPress if that's the the platform you're using and you click update a plug-in but I also let my clients know that sometimes updating a plug-in could cause problems and your website could crash and so forth and then if that is the case and you don't realize it then you can have a website that's partially down for a bit or if it does happen and then you try to get a hold of me to fix the issue I might not be able to jump on it right away so I often explain to the client that if you set up a maintenance agreement I don't call that one a retainer agreement when I'm dealing with a client I call it a maintenance agreement and I tell them that for a fixed amount I will go into their website once a month update any plugins that need updated and make sure that all the web links and everything on the website is working properly and what I normally do is I set it up on a monthly basis I tell them the amount and usually the amount is determined by the size of the website and how many plugins and that and I will tell them this is how much it's gonna cost you per month but I will give them two months free if they pay for the full year and out of every client that I've had I've never had a client want to pay monthly when I tell them that they'll get two months free if they pay for the full year they've all opted for that option now the great thing about website maintenance is most of the time I'd say 95% of the time it goes really smoothly so you go in there you click a few updates everything gets done and then you move on and the five ten minutes it took you to do that you just earned your monthly income from that maintance agreement and usually the the five percent of the time that something might break then you have to spend a little bit of time fixing it but overall when you look at the entire thing even giving two months discount or two months for free I should say I still come across ahead in the end so that's how I handle website maintenance I always get them to sign a contract upfront along with the design contract the other thing I kind of do to spruces up is I charge hosting to my clients because they're hosted on a server that I manage or that I purchase space on so if they sign up with a maintenance agreement then I tell them that part of the maintenance covers the hosting cost so I don't charge them extra for the hosting or the domain name if I'm managing the domain name for them but as far as other jobs go a lot of that just comes to the communication and the relationship you build with the client a lot of times what I'll do is I'll build the website for client and then I'll tell them afterwards well what other marketing materials do you have and how closely are they tied in to the website and when the client says well I don't know what you're talking about and I'll ask them do you have a flyer or a brochure or something you use and if they say yes I say well how closely does it resemble the website and usually I know this upfront because I've designed the website and since I didn't design the brochure I know that they don't really match and that's when I get into talking to them about branding and brand awareness and how all your marketing material should have a similar feel to it and I ask the missus do you want me to redesign your brochure or your pamphlet or your poster or whatever their marketing material is do you want me to redesign it so that you have a coherent and consistent look across everything and more often than not I end up getting some good print design jobs because of that now I'll tell you a little secret don't go asking them directly if they want you to redesign the stuff what you do is go ask them now that you've built a website for them ask them how are they promoting the website and a lot of times clients a well I don't I'm not really promoting it and then he can go in with suggestions and that's when you start talking and this is how you build the relationship you become that strategic partner that I keep talking about with them is when you start talking strategy on what they can do is their website listed on their business vehicle is that something you'd like me to arrange for you to have the website put on in vinyl letters or something on the side of your vehicle you need some sort of marketing pieces in your Lobby so when people come visit your business they can see right away what the website address is and to help promote it so that then when they go home they're still thinking of you that's something a lot of people are not really thinking of is in their Lobby when people come to their business it's one thing to put it on your truck or to put your website on your ads and all that stuff but when people walk into your business is there anywhere inside your business that actually tells the client what your website is in case they want to follow up with you afterwards without picking up a business card or a flier that might be there so I'll often talk to clients about pop-up displays or even banners to put up or even something more classy and having some sort of lettering put up on the walls that shows the website and even if they don't agree to any of this stuff just the fact that you're discussing it with them and you're strategizing with them it helps build that relationship in which they may come back to you and if you suggest all these things and then remind them that you do more than just build websites unless that's all you do some designers that's all they do is websites but even if that's the case then remind them that you may be able to do SEO for them you may be able to design sales funnels if they sell anything through their website a great thing to do is ask them about their social media presence you just built a website for them that has a special look just for them well what about their Facebook group Instagram Twitter if they have all that stuff do they need you to design those so that they're all coherent with the website so that's another great one if you're just doing web design then it's very easy for you to design stuff for Twitter for Facebook and for whatever other social media platforms maybe Pinterest design the banners and the avatars and all that stuff for the rest of their social media so that it matches the website and then the last thing I want to tell you Kaitlyn is just follow up with the clients if you haven't heard from the in a couple of months send them an email ask him how they're doing if they're enjoying the website is there any other service that you could do for them one great thing you could do is mention something else if you have a client that you built a website for and then you took care of all their social media graphics and such maybe reach out to another client that you did a website for and just say hey how you doing you know I was thinking of you I looked at the website just to make sure everything was okay and I was wondering if there's anything else you you might need I just finished creating all the graphics for some other company's social media in order to tie it into their website and I was wondering if that's something you might be interested in or you can mention something how you designed a postcard for a company in order for them to promote their website and they saw two hundred three hundred percent uptake in traffic after sending out the postcards is that something you've considered and would you be interested in discussing it with me I've talked about it before in the podcast Caitlin where clients a lot of times they hire you for one job and they don't know what else you do actually the very second episode of resourceful designer is entitled do your clients know what you do and I talked about this how when a client comes to you for a website they don't think okay well this person also does business cards Flyers posters social media graphics web banners and all this stuff they just know that you do websites so it's up to you to inform them and to educate them on what it is you can do and that's all part of building the relationship so I hope that answers your question Caitlin and I hope you got a lot about this episode just talking about working on retainer as a graphic designer now next week's episode will be a surprise not because I have anything special in store for you just because I honestly haven't decided what next week's topic is gonna be normally I know what the next week is gonna be before I record the the current week's topic but I have a few ideas in mine and I just haven't settled on which one it'll be so next week's podcast topic will be a surprise now before I go I want to remind you about the podcast Awards you have until April 30th to nominate resourceful designer in the arts category and for all instructions you can visit resourceful designer comm slash podcast Awards and don't forget about my resource of the week which is what the font calm a great way to discover what font was used on whatever piece you've been given by a client so that's it for this week's episode if you want to reach out to me I'm available on twitter at resourceful d my facebook page is facebook.com slash resourceful designer and if you have any questions for me or any comments about the podcast please feel free to use my feedback form at resourceful designer comm slash feedback or send me an email at feedback at resourceful designer calm until next week I wish you all the best in your graphic design business a marque Ducote reminding you to stay creative [Music] thanks for listening to the resourceful designer podcast at resourceful designer dot-com [Music] you [Music]